Impact of Insurance Fraud and Elder Care Abuse

Christopher Iu, Acting Insurance Fraud Prosecutor in New Jersey in the Office of the Attorney General, discusses how insurance fraud impacts all of us, and explains the new “Safe Care Cam” initiative, which lends out cameras to individuals so they can record suspicious activity surrounding elder care.

7/29/17 #116

Excerpt:

"Welcome to State of Affairs. I'm Steve Adubato coming to you from the Agnes Varis NJTV Studio from beautiful Newark, New Jersey. I promise you Chris, it will be better after this. Christopher Iu is acting insurance fraud prosecutor of the New Jersey office of the Attorney General. Good to see you Chris. Great to see you again Steve. You've been with us so many times on our other Caucus programs, excuses me, other CEC programs on public television. Talk to us about what insurance fraud is in the state. Insurance fraud is multiple people trying to defraud the system and destabilize the system. All of us pay for insurance one way or another whether it's health, whether it's auto, whether it's life. There are individuals out there who are pushing up our premiums and making it more expensive for us. How do they do it? So, a lot of times you see, whether they're individual beneficiaries who are defrauding the insurance agency through application fraud. Overstating their wealth, overstating their health, or understating the risks that they have when they drive. Saying that they're a good driver when they're actually bad drivers. And the role of your office is to detect it, protect citizens, and also, by the way we're involved in a public awareness initiative with the Attorney General's office here, and to make people aware of what? Like, what do they do if they think they've been defrauded? So, I think we will fight on multiple fronts. We detect insurance fraud, we prosecute insurance fraud, and if we don't find a prosecutable case, we find that there is an active that had a license, we can refer them to another agency for licensing actions. Say there's a chiropractor who's defrauding the system, we can have his license revoked by another state agency. The other thing that really struck me in getting ready for the show... one of the populations that is seen as particularly vulnerable to insurance fraud are those who are elderly. That's absolutely right. Talk about that. What are we talking about and why are they so vulnerable? So, Attorney General Porrino has a new program out. Chris Porrino? Yes. The Safe Care Cam initiative? Safe Care Cam. Yeah, it's short for safe care camera. So initially it started where multiple people, individuals in the public, were bringing us videos that they had taped of healthcare providers abusing or neglecting their elderly either parents or loved ones. He developed this program that would lend out cameras through a division of consumer affairs to... because they were very expensive, to tape healthcare providers that they..."